


When the Sun Sets in Winter

by Flyology



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alien Planet, Angst, Episode Fix-It: s04e08 Silence in the Library, F/M, Family Drama, Hurt/Comfort, Library Fix-It, Post-Library River Song, Resurrection, Sexual Content, my disaster fic where I say yes to every idea
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:08:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27261760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flyology/pseuds/Flyology
Summary: It was the perfect death. All those people had been put back into their bodies, and in return she had given her life. The dreams that came to her in that sleep of death had been an endless, pale sea. Placating and honey coloured and dull. Of course it couldn’t last.
Relationships: Amy Pond/Rory Williams, Eleventh Doctor/River Song, The Doctor/River Song
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	When the Sun Sets in Winter

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This isn't my first River Song story, but it is the first I feel good about posting. This chapter is from the Doctor's perspective but most chapters will be from River's point of view. I hope someone out there enjoys reading this as much as I enjoy writing it! 
> 
> “He had lied to himself, she’s only in love with the fiction of you. What rubbish, to annihilate every thought of present happiness with the promise of spoilers.”

_So much has changed. And still you are fortunate:_   
_The ideal burns in you like a fever._   
_Or not like a fever, like a second heart._

_\- Louise Glück, Averno_

The Doctor would have kept her if he’d had the chance but she left before he woke. Half a day more. Still, she couldn’t have known what he was about to lose when she slipped away, down the hotel elevator, a quick trip to the launch ship. She couldn’t have known the pit of shadows she would give herself up to.

Somehow he found his way across the hotel room, and into the Tardis. The door slammed shut behind him, closing on the hotel room, and the singing bloody towers that had been their downfall. If only she hadn’t told him that day where she had been. What had compelled her to do it? Hadn’t she taught him spoilers! Had she already been resigned to her fate when she left this morning?

Amy and Rory’s deaths felt different to River’s. Their deaths had been a sudden snap, like a branch that had broken off quite cleanly. It hurt, it reverberated through him, but there was nothing left to recover. He only had to keep going. River’s, on the other hand, had grown in him like a cancer that wraps around the spine. His posture became hunched over, hands in pockets, hat pulled low. At his temples twin streaks of silver cut through his chestnut hair, and he was pretty sure his under eyes had never bruised like this before.

Back in the console room, searching the web for her. It’s a silly thing to do for someone you know, but he’s surprised to find a log of her articles and books, a record of her suspended over citations and social media posts. A picture taken before the expedition to the library had been uploaded just days ago. He found her obituary too, in the pages of Archeology Now, and in the Luna University paper.

_Doctor Song Is survived by her friends, colleagues, and students._

_Doctor Song will be remembered as among the most prolific archaeologists of our times and above all, we will remember her as kind, funny, and warm._

No mention is made of her family, but they probably didn’t know she had a family. What a cruel oversight to leave her appearing to be alone.

There was a recording of a panel she did a few months ago for an archaeological co-op, another where she was being interviewed about her latest book. He watched as she spoke eloquently about something… he couldn’t focus on her words. The movement of her hair when she shook her head. The little smiles that she forced back when she dismantled a question from an adversarial grad student. Her precious laugh condensed by the tinny speaker.

At first he had sought out the Ponds, went back through their timeline a few times, just to see them. They stopped the invasion of the black cubes, they got trapped in the Dalek Asylum and almost didn’t make it out alive, but emerged with their marriage intact.

They even had dinner one night with River. He put on a smile and didn’t let on to where he was in their timeline. She was younger than he’d seen in awhile, just out of Stormcage and so full of hope for their future.

She told him so on the porch later, before pressing her home coordinates into her vortex manipulator.

“I’ll be seeing you?” she asked. There was a vulnerability in her questioning smile that the Doctor had never noticed before. Or maybe he had just pretended to himself that he didn’t see it. He had lied to himself, thought that she was only in love with the fiction of him. What rubbish, to annihilate every thought of present happiness with the promise of spoilers. It’s almost enough to make him angry with her for starting it, but he soon remembers that from her perspective, he invented spoilers. How the idea used to thrill and galvanize them. Now it served to remind him of their ouroboros of a relationship.

He grasped her arm before she could go, “Wait. Let me give you a lift.”

A mischievous grin lit up her face, “Hmm, I might just take you up on that…” she leaned a little into his side. Her curls brushed his shoulder, and he tentatively put an arm around her. He’d thought Darillium would be their last night together, but then, temporal infidelity was kind of their thing. “But I’m busy tonight, I’m afraid. Future you called,” she said with a flirtatious wink. “I’m good, but I’m not that good.”

The Doctor flushed, “No, I’m future me. Definitely. Past me was stood-up.”

“Will you never get enough of me?” River said, with a knowing mischief in her eye up at him. Did she enjoy seeing him squirm? Why even ask that? Of course she did.

“Not yet anyway, just wait till I go leaving you for Jack.”

“No, you won’t. Do you know how I know? Because I’m meeting the future you tonight. And I know it’s the future you.”

She slipped away from his grip easily. He had gone slack. She walked down the garden path, and he watched her go. She was wearing a new dress in olive green that suited her so well. It was fitted to the hips.He wanted to tell her it was impossible. He wouldn’t see her again; it wasn’t possible. Then again, this shouldn’t be possible either. So fuck it.

“River, wait!”

She stopped and turned around, as she tucked her hands, all demure, behind her back. She still wore that little smile that made him smile back every time he saw it.

“When are you?”

“Oh sweetie, you know how it is. Spoilers.”

He didn’t go back to the Ponds after that night.

Time in the Tardis had passed with abject regularity after he’d left Darillium that the Doctor had lost track of how long he had been under the Tardis console. She’d been trying to cheer him up by malfunctioning when he’d set out for London. It would have been so easy to keep going. To play at being the cheerful Doctor. One last run. He’d set things right with the circuitry instead, and reinstalled the swimming pool.

The Tardis wheezed to life of her own accord, sending him spinning out the vortex, as if pulled by some external force. Finally, something interesting, he thought with a resigned shake of his head as he pulled the blue stabilizers down. River had always been a better driver.

It was night when the Doctor swung open the door on River’s back yard. The earth loomed, blue above the rooftops and trees and the atmosphere of the moon was cold this deep into it’s month long night. Ice crunched on the lawn as The Doctor made his way to the back door.

Her house was colder than the night. She only left this place a week ago. It’s exactly as it was. If he didn’t know any better, he’d expect her to be reading on the couch, or in the shower, just a shout away. How long he stood in the darkened kitchen, eyes closed, waiting for something that would never happen, he couldn’t say.

But he wasn’t alone in the house. He was first alerted to this by a thump that ricocheted through the house. The Doctor leapt up. He went for the lightswitch, but paused before he turned on the lights. What in the universe was he planning to do? Well, he wasn’t about to leave River’s house while someone rifled through her bedroom.

He ventured around the corner toward the source of the crash. River’s house was cluttered with nick nacks that she had picked up over her life. The counter that separated the living room and the kitchen was taken over by a Mycenaean bowl that ought to have been in a museum. To the right of it sat River’s abandoned mug; “Archeology Is A Lot of Trowel and Error,” it read. He kept on, down the little corridor that led to their bedroom- well, River’s really.

He paused outside the bedroom door. Waited for some further disturbance. The intruder couldn’t stay in there forever. After a couple seconds, he convinced himself that he was being very silly. When did the Doctor ever pause before opening a door? River Song would laugh to see him standing there, allowing fear to consume him.

He threw the door open.

The room was empty. Well, no that’s not right. It was overflowing with stuff. River’s clothes, River’s journals, River’s bed, River’s collection of antique weaponry. He gripped the door knob to steady himself. He must be getting silly in his old age. It was probably just the next door neighbours making noise. He was about to shut the door and leave when something rubbed against his legs, a warm, hairy something that was giving a rather high pitched ‘Meow!’

“Osiris?” River’s fluffy grey tomcat whipped his tail against the Doctor’s shins.

“Haven’t you got food?” The Doctor followed the cat back to the kitchen. In the pantry he found a stash of canned cat food. Wincing at the pungent smell, the Doctor emptied the can into the cat’s ceramic dish.

Osiris had been River’s cat for such a long amount of time that the Doctor had begun to suspect she was using regeneration energy on him. But that was impossible. The Doctor sat on the counter and snacked on a pack of jammie dodgers he’d found next to the cat food. When the cat finished his meal he hopped up next on the counter and shoved his face into the Doctor’s hand.

“Alright little fellow,” the Doctor admits defeat and scoops Osiris into his arms. He lets out a breath. When had he started being this paranoid? He leaned back on the cabinets and closed his eyes. Maybe the Tardis had brought him here for a reason.

The Ponds smiled out of the many photos River had magneted to her fridge. One from the Pond’s fifth anniversary, Amy and Rory on their sofa, but all he saw was River. She had her arms around his waist. The shape and weight of her chin on his shoulder was pressed there still. In another, River pointed her sonic trowel at the camera. He had taken it on the day she had led her dig on a moon called Dorh. He’d teased her to no end about that trowel, but his hearts couldn’t contain his pride when she led her team to the dig site.

When the lights came on, the Doctor jumped. There was a woman in the doorway. Not River. She pulled out a chair, meaning for him to sit across from her. He had never seen her out of battle before, with both her eyes were exposed, their pale grey was eerie in the predawn light. Later he’d think of something clever to say, but in that moment he just sat and gaped at her. It was all wrong. Her hair was grey. She wore River’s terry cloth dressing gown and fluffy slippers.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Madame Kovarian said at last. Her voice pierced the deathly silence that had overtaken the house before.

The Doctor’s arms had gone tight around Osiris. He wriggled around in his arms until the Doctor gave up and let the fur ball scamper down across the counter.

The Doctor’s arms had gone tight around Osiris. He wriggled around in his arms until the Doctor gave up and let the furball scamper down across the counter.

“For a moment.” The Doctor was still half dazed. Then, regaining the use of his tongue, he said, “Come to gloat?”

“Gloat? Why in heaven would I gloat? I’m grieving.” She stared at him down the tip of her nose, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

The Doctor was bewildered. He thought they had left The Silence behind years ago. How did Kovarian even find out where River lived? He stayed leaning on the counter, unsure of his next move, except that he wanted her out of the house. Gone forever.

“That’s likely,” he snapped. “How did you find us?”

“Finding you, Doctor, isn’t easy, but when you have the friends I do, nothing is impossible. I assumed you would show up here eventually.”

“You’ve been waiting? What, come to finish me off?”

“I relish the idea, but no.”

“What? I thought the Silence wanted me dead. Your mission in life, isn’t it?”

“So self obsessed. I do wonder at my daughter‘s taste... In any case, my faction fell out, and after that The Church… anyhow, I don’t come to you on their behalf. This is a personal matter, Doctor. This is about Melody.”

His breath caught at the mention of River. Madame Kovarian tilted her head to one side and didn’t shift her gaze from him.

“River Song is dead,” he rasped. “Or hadn’t you heard?”

“Yes. She was so selfless in the end. That, or maybe she just liked to play the martyr, particularly for you,” said Kovarian.

“She was brave and in spite of your influence, when she thought something was right she always saw it through. I could never have asked for someone more loyal or-” the Doctor broke off, watching the cat pace the counters, as if even he could sense the unease that filled the room. He was not ashamed of his tears, but he didn’t want Madame Kovarian to think he was easily fooled by her display of sorrow.

He cleared his throat: “But I always knew her time would come.”

Madame Kovarian drummed her knuckles on the table. “I didn’t want to come here,” she said.

“Then leave.”

“Funny, funny, Doctor,” she closed her eyes and leaned back in the chair so that her head fell against the back. “There is a way to return Melody to the living.” She paused as if waiting for a response. “Some time ago, I obtained information from within The Library. Her body remains in a stasis chamber, you see the computer had enough time in the split second before she would have been burnt to nothing to retrieve the corpse, intact, though unable to regenerate of course, and her mind was uploaded, so to speak, into the database, making it difficult to retrieve her intact.”

“Why are you telling me this?” His voice cracked, and guilt snapped over his chest like an elastic band. The kitchen narrowed. He felt like he was about to faint, or perhaps wake up to find this whole evening had been a wine induced fugue.

“I want my daughter back. Is that not good enough for you, Doctor?”

“Not for a parent who loved their child.”

“And it’s so hard for you to believe that I do?”

“Why have you come to me? Because if you knew this- that she could be restored to life, then you would not tell the only person who would take her from you. Unless that person had something you need?” He realized he was pacing with the cat now. His hands fidgeted of their own accord with a forgotten bobby pin.

“We have the body, all we need is the mind. And the artron energy.”

“Who is “we”?”

Madame Kovarian did not respond. She stared into the darkened garden, over his head. Was she looking at The Tardis? Could she see it in the gloom, between the lilac bushes?

In some ways, he’d mourned River a long time ago. Wisdom says that time heals all wounds. But if anything the loss of her had only increased. When he’d seen her go that first time, he had been sorry, but he hadn’t known her yet. Saving her to the library’s computer had seemed an excellent solution once. But now it was clear how paltry his act of saving had been.

Madame Kovarian got up with a shrug, “I suppose I thought you would do the right thing by Melody and...” she gave him a cynical smile, like a card player about to take the deck, “and the baby.”

“What?”

“Did she not tell you? I can’t imagine why.”

“I’ll help you,” he said quickly. Her words were still sinking in. He gripped the counter with one hand. If what she said was true, he had to find River as soon as possible. “But I want to see her first.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading till the end! I hope to have the next chapter up soon, but only once I've finished chapter six because I refuse to fall behind.


End file.
